Barbara Walters: "I Was Not a Gloria Steinem"

At the start of her career in broadcast journalism, Barbara Walters was given a special assignment. Top brass at the Today show cherry-picked the promising young reporter to cover "A Day in the Life of a Playboy Bunny." To tape the segment, the network dressed her in a strapless corset, ears, and a fluffy tail.

Walters was unfazed. She suited up and filmed the piece in full stiff, satin regalia.

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On Tuesday night, the veteran anchor narrated such indignities, reflected on her early career, and revealed the "most flirtatious interview I've ever done" during an appearance at the Harvard University Institute of Politics.

Clad in a leather blazer and the kind of shimmering aura that befits a woman who has interviewed both Fidel Castro and Michael Jackson, Walters maintained that she did not endure the rabbit costume "in vain."

After all, the experience taught her the proper way to serve a drink. (The trick, she counseled, is to bend at the knees.)

But despite such unsavory evidence and the realities of the era in which she came of age, the television icon claimed she never felt limited in her ambitions.

"I was not a Gloria Steinem—wonderful person as Gloria is," she contended. "I felt that there was nothing I couldn't do. I didn't feel restricted."

According to Walters, the feminist movement that her friend embodied "came later."

"I remember writing a letter to the president of NBC News [to say] we should do something about this," Walters recalled. "I got a note back that said, 'Not enough interest.'"

Walters acknowledged that she did not achieve the fearlessness that made her famous on her own. She credited her upbringing and characterized her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence, as a place that "taught you how to think for yourself and most of all to not be afraid to ask questions."

Later, Walters articulated her approach to interviews in much the same terms: "I like to go beyond the surface question."

"If you don't have curiosity, you shouldn't be in this business," she said. "You should do your homework, you should know your subject, and you should have, first and foremost, curiosity."

Walters punctuated her address with keen and clear-eyed impressions of some of her most famous subjects. Castro, she pronounced, "had vision." Richard Nixon, she sniffed, "seemed to me constipated." And Ronald Reagan was "the nicest man, the nicest man." But it was an exchange with Clint Eastwood that once left her breathless.

"I think it's the most flirtatious interview I've ever done," she admitted. The consummate professional assured her audience that she declined an invitation to join the movie star for dinner that evening some 30 years ago, but confessed— and not for the first time—that she has often wondered what might have been.

"I could have been Mrs. Clint Eastwood!" she moaned.

Evidently, her aspirations lay elsewhere.

Walters retired from her most recent post as co-host ofThe View
in May. The coming year marks the first in over five decades that she will not appear on regular network television.

Even so, the icon is as opinionated as ever. When asked to advise young women eager to follow in her footsteps, Walters did not mince words.

"Fight the big fight," she said. "Don't bitch and complain."

Pausing to consider earlier battles with bad bosses and petty coworkers, Walters conceded: "There are times when [something] is so important that you'll have to take the chance of walking out and leaving and you have to be prepared. But every little thing isn't worth fighting for."

"Get your foot in the door," she instructed. "Get there before everybody gets there in the morning. Stay later than everybody stays. Get the coffee if they want the coffee… Don't be above it. And then just be so invaluable that they give you a raise and your own desk and your own voice."